Friday, May 26, 2017

A response to Heather A. Swanson's "The Banality of the Anthropocene"

This article really reminds me of the a Sustainability Theory and Practice
commodity lifecycle assignment, as well as the way that just
sustainabilities suggests an inclusive turn to both understand the
roots, in the way of environmental racism, the grandmother of just
sustainabilities, via environmental justice, as well as inviting us into the future. Just sustainabilities
directs our attention and hones our skill at touching in both ways
- in the Macyian language, to see both the historical and futurity, the
ancestors and the future beings. Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans (2003)
argued for this important dimension, noting
that “sustainable development requires that we give consideration to
our own developmental needs, as well as those of generations still to
come" (p. 188).

So when the author Swanson (2017) suggested:

"Donna Haraway has called for curiosity as both scholarly method and
political practice, as an antidote to these learned blindnesses. In her
book When Species Meet (Haraway 2008), she becomes curious
about who and what she touches when she reaches out to pet her dog. That
curiosity becomes a radical practice of tracing and inheriting
histories, such as the dog-herding practices of livestock-based
Australian colonization efforts and the making of purebred dogs. But in a
world of structural blindness, such kinds of curiosity do not come
naturally. They must be cultivated. But how? How, in the words of Joseph
Dumit (2014), do we wake up to connections?

"Can we imagine corollaries to Bible study meetings or
consciousness-raising groups in which people would be encouraged to
trace the histories of the landscapes they inhabit, a process that might
draw them into new ways of seeing themselves and their worlds? I
imagine such practices as a multispecies analogue to Foucauldian
genealogy (see Foucault 1970). Might exploring the genealogies of Iowa
cornfields, for example, denaturalize them and counter the power of
their banality? Might they enable Iowans and all of us to become more
curious about the conditions of our own subjectivities and, in turn, how
we might transform the landscapes with which they are entangled? This
is the important work of making curiosity more common, of troubling the
Anthropocene." (para. 15-16)

I imagine something extra,
too. Thinking of the active hope practices (Macy & Johnstone, 2012),
I imagine we can cultivate a way of touching the dog and turn both
ways, virtually, in the way the present contains the past AND the
future. I can conduct the kind of "multispecies ...Foucauldian
geneology" that Swanson suggested (para. 16) as well as touch out and
sweep forward, into a potentially regenerative future, how this being,
this moment of connection, contact, and conscious shift, how my gaze can
become a dedicated glance (in the spirit of Casey, 2007), including a
prophetic touching out towards the future beings. Macy and Johnstone
described "learning to reinhabit time" (2012, p. 117). Deep time is
expansive and invitational.

"Could
future generations, for example, discover a way to communicate with us?
And if so, what might they say? Perhaps they could only do this if we
play our part too by extending ourselves forward in time to meet them.
We can do this through our imagination. We don't know whether the
communications we would receive this way would be real or imagined --
and we don't really need to know. They still offer useful guidance....By
giving future beings a voice, we bring them closer in a way that helps
us be guided by their perspective. Hearing ourselves reply to them also
helps us to step into a larger view of time" (pp. 158-159).

In
this way, I would suggest sustainability and regenerative education
invite us to to both/and geneological and futurecasting, future-sensing
connectivity and relationality. This sensitization can be sustaining and
opening. As Macy and Johnstone suggested,

"We
can bring deep time to mind as we go about our daily lives. Even as we
wash the dishes, pay the bills, go to meetings, and so on, we can school
ourselves to be aware, now and then, of the hosts of ancestral and
future beings surrounding us like a cloud of witnesses. We can remember
the vaster story of our planet and let it imbue the most ordinary acts
with meaning and purpose. Each of us is an intrinsic part of that story,
like a cell in a larger organism. And in this story, each of us has a
role to play." (p. 160)

I wish for us each this recombinant
and life-giving inclusion of the future beings as well, to sustain us
for the work we are called to do, "a cloud of witnesses" (p. 160) and
encouragers as we become re-imbricated, re-woven into awareness of the
flourishing of the universe in and through us.

This might well
help us embody Swanson's invitation, to "become more curious about the
conditions of our own subjectivities and,
in turn, how we might transform the landscapes with which they are
entangled" (2017, para. 16). We might sense that part of this invitation
is not only how we might transform these landscapes; it might also be a
matter of how these landscapes themselves are transforming us. In a
futurecasting of the disintegration of theme parks and the resurging
Earth, I imagined a terrapsychological resurgence, "Gaia Taking Back
Disneyland" (Hauk, 2016). This involves a collaborative, co-creative
re-animation of the living Earth as a co-imaginer of the regenerative
possibilities also rippling out from touching the dog. With the land in
and through us, with our polychrest capacity to touch out and connect in
temporally with what has been wrought and what the future beings are
summoning us to, I ask: What stories of the regenerative future are you
touching into, carrying, and birthing?

Earth Empathy

Gaian Methodologies

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The Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies offers graduate and certificate programs at the convergence of creativity, eco-restoration, and the living wisdom traditions in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion.